Meet the Authors
We're very excited to welcome the following authors to the 2023 Chippewa Valley Book Festival. Peruse the authors here and then hop over to the 2023 schedule of events to learn more about where and when you can meet them. Pop over for some author Q&As for additional insight into this year’s presenters.
Abra Berens
Abra Berens is a Michigan based chef, author, and former farmer. Through every recipe written and meal served, she aims to tighten the connection between eaters and growers. She believes we can invest in a stronger, more equitable foods system for everyone from producers to grocers to consumers. Her dinners at Granor Farm in Three Oaks, Michigan, made her a James Beard semifinalist for Outstanding Chef: Great Lakes.
Ruffage is her first cookbook and focuses on vegetables–how to select them, how to store them, how to prepare them along with hundreds of recipe variations to make it easy to work delicious veggies into your daily repertoire. It was also a Michigan Notable Book winner and James Beard Award nominee. Grist, her second book, builds upon the ideas of Ruffage to provide creative, easy, and endlessly riff-able meals from grains, beans, seeds, and legumes. Pulp completes the series with a focus on the fruit of the Midwest. Pulp weaves together savory dishes that feature fruit as well as a cannon of baking recipes to present fruit at any point in the day or meal.
Nickolas Butler
NICKOLAS BUTLER is the internationally-bestselling and prize-winning author of Shotgun Lovesongs, Beneath the Bonfire, The Hearts of Men, Little Faith, and Godspeed. He is also an award-winning poet and newspaper columnist. Butler lives with his family on 16 acres south of Eau Claire between Cleghorn and Brackett in the town of Washington, though he collects his mail in Fall Creek.
Carol Dunbar
CAROL DUNBAR is a working writer and former actor, playwright, and coloratura soprano who left her life in the city to live off the grid. Her debut novel, The Net Beneath Us, won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was a finalist for the Midland Society of Authors book awards. Her second novel, A Winter’s Rime, releases in the fall of 2023. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, The South Carolina Review, and on Wisconsin Public Radio. She writes from a solar-powered office on the second floor of a water tower where she lives in a house in the woods with her husband, two kids, and a giant Alaskan malamute.
Melissa Faliveno
MELISSA FALIVENO is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland: Essays, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, and Electric Literature, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Bitch, Lit Hub, and Brooklyn Rail, among others; received a notable selection in Best American Essays; and appears in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic. The former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine, she has taught creative writing at Kenyon College, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, and Sarah Lawrence College, where she earned an MFA. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Denison University and on the MFA faculty at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
V.V. Ganeshananthan
V. V. GANESHANANTHAN (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among other publications. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota, and since 2017, has co-hosted the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
Maggie Ginsberg
MAGGIE GINSBERG is a senior editor at Madison Magazine and a long-time contributor to regional and national publications. Her nonfiction work has been honored by the American Society of Journalists and Authors, the National City and Regional Magazine Association, and the Milwaukee Press Club. She turned to fiction for the first time with her debut literary novel, Still True, which was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in September 2022. Maggie was born in Minnesota and has lived in Wisconsin since 1985, and Still True is set in a fictional rural community much like the small towns in which she's always lived.
Nicholas Gulig
NICHOLAS GULIG is a Thai-American poet and is the current Wisconsin Poet Laureate. A 2011 Fulbright Fellow, Gulig has received numerous other accolades for his work including the Rushkin Art Club Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, the Grist ProForma Award, and the CSU Open Book Poetry Prize. Currently, he works as Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and lives with his wife and two daughters in Fort Atkinson.
Stephen Shaskan
Stephen Shaskan is the author and illustrator of several picture books including: Big Choo, Toad on the Road, Max Speed, The Three Triceratops Tuff, A Dog Is a Dog, and the graphic novel series Pizza and Taco. He also illustrated the picture book Punk Skunks and the graphic novel series Q and Ray, both written by his wife Trisha Speed Shaskan. Stephen and Trisha live in Minneapolis, Minnesota and love visiting schools and libraries: reading their stories and inspiring young authors/illustrators.
Jonathan Slaght
JONATHAN SLAGHT is a biologist and author. As the Regional Director for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Temperate Asia Program, his duties include oversight of WCS activities in Russia, Mongolia, China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran. His first book, Owls of the Eastern Ice, was published in 2020 to acclaim. His other writings, scientific research, and photographs have been featured in the BBC, the New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The New Yorker, and Audubon Magazine, among others. He is currently under contract with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux to write a second book, titled Tigers Between Empires, about tiger conservation in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Scott Spoolman
Growing up in northern Wisconsin, science writer SCOTT SPOOLMAN has focused on telling stories of natural science and the environment related to Wisconsin and surrounding states. He and earned a master's degree in journalism with an emphasis on science reporting and has coauthored a series of environmental science textbooks. His recently published books are Wisconsin Waters: The Ancient History of Lakes, Rivers, and Waterfalls and the award-winning Wisconsin State Parks: Extraordinary Stories of Geology and Natural History, and Wisconsin Rocks: A Guide to Geologic Sites in the Badger State.
Doug Tallamy
DOUG TALLAMY is the T. A. Baker Professor at the University of Delaware, where he has taught insect-related courses for 42 years and authored over 100 research publications. His books include Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants; The Living Landscape: Designing for Beauty and Biodiversity in the Home Garden, co-authored with Rick Darke; Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard, a New York Times Best Seller; and The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees, winner of the American Horticultural Society’s 2022 book award. In 2021 he cofounded Homegrown National Park with Michelle Alfandari. His awards include recognition from The Garden Writer’s Association, Audubon, The National Wildlife Federation, Allegheny College, Ecoforesters, The Garden Club of America, and The American Horticultural Association.
Shelby Van Pelt
When SHELBY VAN PELT isn’t feeding her flash-fiction addiction, she’s juggling cats while wrangling children. Her debut novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures, has become an instant New York Times bestseller, a Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick and a best book of summer by the Chicago Tribune.
Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she’s currently missing the mountains in the suburbs of Chicago.
Nghi Vo
NGHI VO is the author of the novels Siren Queen and The Chosen and The Beautiful as well as the acclaimed novellas Mammoth at the Gate and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, which was a finalist for the Locus and Ignyte Award and winner of both the Crawford Award and the Hugo Award. Born in Illinois, she now lives on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Laura Warrell
LAURA WARRELL is the author of the novel Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, and long-listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Golden Poppy Book Award through the California Independent Booksellers Alliance. Named a ‘best’ or ‘must-read’ book by Vanity Fair, People, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Apple Books, The Root, The Millions, Hollywood Reporter, Bustle, Today, Debutiful, and elsewhere, the novel was also chosen as a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, and an Indie Next List Pick.
